Brown Bear Saloon in Indian, Alaska - Population 85 - On the Road # 16

I even had a really nice date while i stayed behind the Brown Bear Saloon in Indian, Alaska.

Hey y’all,

I have so many vivid memories of the people I met at the Brown Bear Saloon in Indian, Alaska (population 85) along the Turnagain Arm.

As tourism slowed way down in the autumn, I stayed in one of the cabins behind the Saloon for about two weeks. I hoped to take a break from selling and being “ON” for the sake of getting some writing done.

The Brown Bear Saloon was my go-to for morning coffee and dinner, as well as those conversations that kept me somewhat tethered to the human race, and kept the loneliness at bay.

I remember meeting a very kind-hearted woman who had been a bartender since she was 23. She had a pretty face, with sparkling green eyes, and graying hair done in braided pigtails. She didn’t work at the Brown Bear Saloon. She had worked in a neighborhood watering hole for 17 years somewhere in Anchorage.

Restaurant/bar work can really suck people in. Most people work in hospitality as they go to college or figure out what they want to do. I had been one of those, and managed to pull myself out of the hospitality vortex in the nick of time.

This lady admitted she had stayed there too long, was burned out, yet didn’t know what to do beyond starting a hot dog stand. I hope she found her way out of there because she was very gentle with a very peaceful energy.

It’s a dirty business. There’s no shame in it.

I even had a really nice date while I stayed behind the Brown Bear Saloon in Indian, Alaska. Remember, the population was only 85 people, so this date was pretty remarkable.

I don’t remember my date’s name, which I feel bad about because he was a really lovely man. He had dark hair and eyes, and a cheery round face. He took me to dinner and a movie in Anchorage. The movie, “40 Year Old Virgin,” was a guaranteed icebreaker and we both laughed so hard, it hurt.

Afterwards he talked to me about his new career as a teaching assistant in a kindergarten class, and how relieved he was to no longer be a used car salesman. He said that the profession was every smarmy as reputation had it, and gave me a few pointers of tricks they pulled to make a sale more likely.

“For example, say you go for a test drive and come back to the lot. The salesman would encourage you to leave your purse in the car while you look around, go to the bathroom, etc.” 

“How will that make me more likely to buy the car?”

“Because when you leave such a personal item as a purse in a car, you’re already claiming ownership. They salesman is putting it in your mind that the car is already yours.”

I was speechless, and he nodded.

“It’s a dirty business. There’s no shame in it.”

Of everybody who stopped by the Brown Bear Saloon, the motorcycle day-trippers were the most fun to watch. The bikers were not gangsters. They were Anchorage professionals who loved taking day and weekend trips to zoom their bikes along Turnagain Arm and/or into the Kenai Peninsula.

The last pit stop on their way home was at the Brown Bear Saloon. They were a sight to behold decked out in their leathers and bandanas, laughing and talking, and on top of the world.

The last pit stop on their way home was at the Brown Bear Saloon.

I sold a book to one of them. I don’t remember his name, but we had a lovely conversation about his fiercely independent daughter. She was only 17, and had been out on her own since she was 15. He said she lived in Sitka, had a great head on her shoulders and already so capable of taking care of herself. He sounded so proud of her.

I had been in Alaska long enough to not be shocked by this. Talk about kicking ass and taking names? Alaskan teenagers are a different breed. They believe they can do anything, and they often prove themselves right. I met a woman whose 17 year old son already had acquired his pilot’s license. While I lived in Juneau, two 17 year olds who weren’t of legal age to vote, ran for the council positions on the School Board. Neither of them won, but that’s not the point.

But the kicker was that 2 years later, after I’d been back home in Juneau for a while, I met the weekend biker’s daughter. Her name is Ashley, and she taught skiing and snowboarding, as well as doing Ski Patrol.

Those are the moments that make all the suffering worthwhile.

That year was the best snow year on record in Juneau, and I went snowboarding all the time. In a casual conversation, Ashley said she heard I was a writer, asked about my book what was it called?

“Ella Bandita and other stories.”

Ashley got this strange look on her face.

“I have that book. I read it about a year and half ago.”

“What!”

Ashley then tells me this story of her parents meeting me, “this random woman,” buying my book. They read it, and apparently my heart-eating anti-heroine put them off a bit because they thought main story was weird.

But her parents decided to send it on to Ashley anyway as they had intended.

“What did you think?” I asked her.

“I loved it,” she replied. “My parents said, ‘well, I guess you’re weird too.’ But I thought Ella Bandita was awesome. 

Those are the moments that make all the suffering worthwhile.

And I still miss the small town that is the massive state of Alaska.

Peace,
Montgomery

PS: This piece was written from memory of the 2005-2006 DIY booktour/roadtrip in the Alaskan Interior. To check out previous blogs, click here and here.

 

Picking Up Strays - On the Road # 10

Hey y’all,

Again, this is a letter written 14 years after the DIYBTRT in Alaska, the summer and fall of 2005. So Joe and I decided to go to Valdez first before heading to McCarthy for the Blackburn Festival. We were curious to follow the pipeline all the way to Valdez. But Joe slept on that drive, which I couldn’t believe. Maybe he has since experienced the incredible beauty I did. But the drive between the Wrangell/St Elias range and the Chugach range is known for a low cloud cover ALL THE TIME. On that day, the cloud cover lifted and what I saw was all kinds of jaw-dropping-stunning-gorgeous! The jagged peaks, glaciers that stretched almost to the road (or so it seemed) and the deep, rich, emerald green that was both vivid and surreal, I felt like I was driving through a mythical land. Where I lived was plenty beautiful, but this was the most exquisite part of Alaska that I ever saw. And that was only from the road. That was not the backcountry.

Joe decided to stay on in Valdez in the hopes of getting another fishing job. He didn’t and joined me at Blackburn, where we stayed in my half collapsed tent. Shannon, the friend from the peanut oil bus, saw Joe entering my tent and was about to deck him, when I showed up and reassured her that he was a friend of mine. The Festival happened, and the blogs about it are here and here for anybody who’d like to read about it.

Another friend joked that I picked up strays along the way and took them for a ride of a brief spell in my road trip, and that was true after this Girdwood party in Kennicott. I don’t remember how this happened, but after the Festival was over, there were a handful of us who stayed in the parking lot for another night. A photographer from Girdwood who had a passing resemblance to one of the Bee Gees in their prime, he had long hair and a beard, and a similar mindset to somebody who came of age in the Disco era – and no he was not of that age. I think Girdwood’s random lesbian, a cute girl with a pixie blonde haircut and large heart shaped sunglasses, a responsible looking woman and her husband, and me and Joe. Anyway, the Bee Gees photographer dude caught a ride with me and my Beast filled with books, and Joe in the backseat. The drive was several hours to Anchorage and then around Turnagain Arm to Girdwood. The photographer lectured Joe about his attitude about something or other, which pissed Joe off to no end. We still had a place to crash, and Bee Gees Photographer Dude showed us the pictures he had taken of all the belly dancers gyrating near the rusting ruins of a defunct copper mine – because of course, he took a lot pictures of the belly dancers. He didn’t get ANY shots of the magical moment when they danced spontaneously. I doubt the essence of that dance could have been captured in a snapshot though.

Anyway, that catches up the gaps in that particular squeeze of time that I neglected to write home about.

Peace,

Montgomery

Hippie Belly Dancers in Shangri-la - On the Road #8

Hey y'all,

Yesterday I promised other random snippets - you know, impressions and stories that don't fit anywhere, but are good in and of themselves, but after the Pando story, it just didn't seem to fit. If you’d like to read letter before this one, click here.

Anyway here goes:

Hippie Belly Dancers in Shangri-la. 

As I said, when I arrived at the Girdwood party in Kennicott, there was a drumming band playing and belly dancers gyrating. They seemed discombobulated though. Not all their troupe showed up and they were crowded amongst the ruins of a copper mine, and had difficultygetting it together, you know? It was cool and all that, but they were not in sync, within themselves or with each other. 

Of course, I didn't know that until later, I just thought it was an amateur group having fun with their friends...

Later as the sun went down, and the "official" festival was over, the late-night band – Smooth Money Gesture - was setting up their stage down on the moraine - yes, as in glacier - because they agreed to be good neighbors and move the party away from the lodge - a drum circle started at one of the tents. 

The festival was on a hill below an old lodge, which probably used to be part of the copper mine that was in operation in the area for a short time, and above the terminal moraine of a glacier. It's embarrassing, but I can't remember the name of it, but as this glacier cut through a few different valley, it carved so much silt, that it sat on top of it - three feet of it, so it looked like the surface of the moon. You could see rolling hills lines in reddish, yellowish, and grayish hues indicating that this soil came from different valleys. So that was the view.

The tent where this drum circle started up, was right on the edge of this moraine that looked like the end of the world - unless somebody told you, you'd never know there was an ancient glacier underneath. As two or three people started drumming, I left my dilapidated tent (I'd forgotten one pole - kind of a crisis when the tent requires two) to hang out there and sat on the ground, with everybody else. Before long one of the belly dancers came out of the tent.  Instead of her skimpy top, she was wearing a lightweight white sweater with a hood, her long reddish brown hair flowing to her waist. As the music continued, she slowly started to dance, moving her shoulders and upper back in a wave as she spread her arms out and her hips joined in. A couple more people joined the drum circle, beating on plastic buckets, but strangely enough it worked. After a few more minutes, another dancer joined the first, and they synchronized beautifully as they shook their hips when the tempo was fast and circling their hands and fingers slowly above their heads when the tempo was slow. Then a third joined them, and those of us sitting down moved back as they danced in a circle, kicking up their legs and moving in concert. The fourth that joined them didn't have the space to dance, so she added to the beat of the music by shaking bells. The night was cloudy, but every so often the moon peaked through, illuminating the scene that was lit between twilight and darkness...Sitting on the ground, we were at the level of the music, while the dancers celebrated the life in their bodies above us - backlit by the night sky and whatever lamps were coming from the heart of camp. From the ground, they looked like goddesses, once I stood up to move around, they were ordinary women dancing with their friends. The spell was broken and I moved on.  

It was only twenty minutes, but the magic of that time is forever etched in my mind. 

Something tells me this is a good time to stop...

Feel free to drop me a line, y'all know I love to hear from you even when I am on my happy trails...

Montgomery

PS: This was from the DIY booktour/roadtrip I took in 2005/2006. Fortunately or unfortunately, my email journal to my friends was the record I kept of that time. I took NO PICTURES. So this image I used, although striking, has nothing to do with that night.

The God Pan as Box Man - On the Road #7

Hey y'all,

Since I don't have a common theme to play with today and there are lots of images I haven't found space to include, consider this the start of a rummage sale of moments, stories, and such that I've seen and heard while on the road.  

But let's start with the god Pan, the avatar of drunken debauchery and profligate fucking from the pagan days when the worship of many gods for various purposes made sense and everybody was okay with that. Anyway, centuries later when the Word of the Lord was spreading far and wide and probably because Pan was the rock ‘n roll party god, he had the dubious distinction of his image becoming that of the Devil by over-zealous Christians who believed that the flavors of life should be only colored by shades of gray. In case you haven't figured it out, I am a blithering Tom Robbins fan, and “Jitterbug Perfume” gave the god Pan the respect he deserved, with a major, if not starring role, and the favorable impression stuck.  

Why do I mention this now?

Because perhaps it’s possible that the god Pan had to go underground and reincarnate as various human beings to survive the attacks against him; and although he has lost a lot of power, his spirit still lives. And for some crazy damn reason, I'm convinced his current incarnation is in the form of Michael Pando, aka Pando to his friends. For those of you who know Pando, this statement makes total sense because he adores booze to the point of alcoholism and young girls barely into the phase of adulthood. Since he's lost god-status and invincibility, he is weakened by his passions for the party that doesn't stop and often winds up in jail. Everybody who knows Pando has a half dozen outrageous Pando stories to tell, which will become legend.

It is inevitable.

Love him or hate him, he is a character, but a character challenged by finding his good space in this world. He was chased out of Juneau due to a shoot out
with a psycho bum who had taken over the cabin Pando had built.

That kind of thing, you know.

This past summer, Pando had a touristic rafting job with an anal company - which seems to be the case with many touristic companies in Alaska, you know. Anyway, being himself, Pando got drunk one night and stole a golf cart - buck nekkid - and had security chasing him. To disguise himself, he put a box over his head and hightailed it to safety. 

Thus he became known throughout this camp as "Box Man." Every so often, during the summer, Box Man would make a naked public appearance streaking through at the most random moments and it wasn't long before he became legend, and the best part was that nobody knew it was him. One day, he was talking to some dude from some other country and the guy said with a thick
accent, "Box Man, I think he like Zorro. Box man, he come for de peeple."  

Can you imagine hearing something like that about yourself?

Eventually, Pando got booted out due to failing a surprise piss test – he also liked to smoke weed. Well, he had to make a spectacular exit, didn't he? His people would expect it of Box Man.

So one night, when everybody was at dinner, including all the bosses, Box Man makes his final appearance, nakedly running in with a box over him. He stops, strips the box away and stands there with his bare ass and cock, unmasked for all to see before streaking away and packing up his shit to go.   

Pando may have even been sober.  

Since I've only heard about this through the grapevine, I may not have all the details straight. But what the hell, it makes a good story. And when I showed this to Pando, he seemed more than a little flattered.

The god Pan keeping the spirit alive - what do y'all think?

Montgomery

PS This is from the DIY booktour/roadtrip I did in 2005-2006 when marijuana was still illegal everywhere. This is one of my favorite stories from that road trip. Although I did not experience it directly, I knew Pando, and Joe told me this story at the Blackburn Music Festival in Kennicott/McCarthy. I would later have a challenging night crashing in a squatters treehouse in Girdword with both Pando and Joe, while they were drunk and I was sober. Good times.